


Common Knowledge

by gisho



Series: Background Characters [5]
Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Meta, Mid-Canon, epistolatory, jägerdraught
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2018-10-12
Packaged: 2019-07-29 20:16:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16271573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gisho/pseuds/gisho
Summary: Wherin a freelance researcher fails to unravel an ancient mystery. (Written for GG Event Week 2018.)





	Common Knowledge

\--

Miss Rozia,

I did my best, but the fact of the matter is that there's just not that much said - at least not in public - about how the Jägermonsters are made. It's all half-witted speculation, with the occasional admixture of something that seems authentic, because it came from the lips of a Mechanicsburger. I don't mean that idiomatically. I do, however, have an increasing suspicion that they're deliberately spreading false stories, in which case we can regard whatever story you develop as a helpful contribution to the collaborative effort. 

For example: in Ludenheim, a man who was introduced to me as a Mechanicsburger-in-exile, a snail merchant who was in Munich when the town was sealed and subsequently took what he earnestly assured me was temporary residence in Ludenheim on the basis that his elderly in-laws lived there, claimed with complete sincerity that the Jägerdraught is not a draught at all, but an injection of fermented Black Hierophant snail slime.

I wrote down his recipe, too. The slime has to be mixed with one-quarter its weight in vinegar and kept in a cool, dark room - he couldn't say how long; the Masters, who he spoke of with an audible capital letter, never mentioned that part to the snail farmers - until it developed the appropriate properties. Then it had electricity run through it. This was why it had to be delivered in vats with two copper rods mounted permanently in the lid, you understand. In fact he suspected that the Masters ran a continuous trickle-charge through the vats while it fermented. In any case, electricity was an essential ingredient. He said he had this next part from childhood conversations with a Jäger friend of his father's: the precipitate collected at one electrode was mixed with some kind of alkaline solution, until it turned dark blue, and then it was ready to be given to the volunteers.

He told me all this with great earnesty, and only enough hesitation to accept a small bribe of money and a large glass of whiskey and conclude that, as he wasn't revealing details such as the composition of the alkaline solution, was in fact incapable of revealing them as he was unfamiliar with them, and as I had no intention of recreating the draught, was in fact incapable of it as Black Hierophant snails are exclusively a Mechanicsburg product and aren't exported since they don't last well on ice, and Mechanicsburg is inaccessible for the foreseeable future, it would probably be all right to talk about it. I thanked him for his candor. Then I went to look up Black Hierophants in the biological library at Transylvania Polygnostic, in case there was some well-known chemical property of their venom that would give some person with more chemistrological background than myself a useful insight into the relevant processes of fermentation. 

Lo and behold, half an hour with Tyvaultin's Arthropodian Compliation revealed that Black Hierophants were crossbred from the Hungarian Cyclops and an undescribed species from Crete, in 1793 - rendering them unlikely, to say the least, as vital components in a ritual dating back seven hundred years, by the most reliable accounts.

I travelled on to Balan's Gap. I'll not waste paper on the shenanigans required to gain access to the Deep Library; suffice it to say it was far simpler this time than when I first attempted research there in my callow youth, and worth the effort for pecuniary gain as well as personal satisfaction since there was a significant chance as many as five or six of my paying clients' questions could profitably be investigated there. (I must pause to note, Miss Rozia, that your questions are an absolute delight. Do not compare yourself disfavorably to my so-called serious customers; you make more, and less damaging, use of the results than all those rich idiots trying to prove title to some suddenly-important patch of dirt and all those pseudo-madboys in search of a better mouse-disintegrator. You are interesting, and you have earned the friends-and-family discount better than my blood relatives.) I found an account by a monastic scholar, Brother Dion of St. Szpac, relating a conversation with one Hilarion von Mekkhan. It seems that this Von Mekkhan volunteered the information, when the question arose in the middle of a spiritual debate, that the Jägerdraught was brewed from the blood of defeated enemies, and therefore could only be made after a great victory - or by the willing sacrifice, in times of strife, of Mechanicsburgers themselves.

This conversation took place not even sixty years ago; Von Mekkhan's age was unspecified as irrelevant to the account, but if he was a young man then he might still be alive to corroborate or deny it. Once his hometown is open to visitors again, if anyone asked, I expect he would confirm.

But while anthropophagic - I cannot say slanders, for it was a Mechanicsburger who originated the tale; let us say legends - legends may provide a certain frisson, a romantic gloss on a story full enough of blood already, they do not stand up to even cursory scientific scrutiny. Blood in itself has no medicinal properties when ingested. Martial cultures as far removed from the present day as the Ugrarchites practiced ritual blood-drinking to no apparent effect beyond the psychological. The only plausible method would be if the blood contained pathogens with mutagenic effect, and keeping such pathogens contained to whatever apparatus was used to introduce them to enemy blood would have been a monumental undertaking. An outbreak of Jägerism among the civilian population of Mechanicsburg is likely to at least have been noted.

So you see why it might be advantageous to take a position of skeptical agnosticism toward the details of the ritual. Your readers are smart. Allow them to interpolate. 

The nearest to a plausible explanation I heard was one from a young woman away at school in Bucharest when she discovered she could no longer go home to Mechanicsburg, and who had shortly changed her area of study to aeolophysics, intending to seek employment with the Baron Wulfenbach once she had completed the course. The Jägerdraught, she told me, is a metaphor. Jägers are created surgically; to 'drink the draught' means to volunteer for the process and swear loyalty to the Heterodyne unto death, or beyond if the Heterodyne can revive you. All Jägers are blood-brothers, bound by a common oath. 

I suppose, in brief summary, my conclusion is - do as best pleases you. The story, after all, is yours. No-one will contradict you; no one but those who have demonstrated themselves willing to deploy such elaborate deceptions would be in a position to. It may even be that they will adopt your story, if you develop one suitably convincing and with a few relevant details carefully elided, as something let slip, a secret they would have preferred remain a secret, but whose depths you were somehow able to plumb regardless - an affront they elect to let lie since you did the courtesy of keeping vital details veiled.

But that is pure speculation; I am neither a psychologist nor an artist, for all I have developed pretensions to folkloristicity in the course of my employment.

Speaking of which, Miss Rozia, it seems I need to pass some time in Buda as well and my return will necessarily be delayed by perhaps as much as ten days - trivial concerns I shaln't bore you with here, for I intend this missive to take the nine-twelve train home that I should have preferred to take in person, and the hour is already past eight. Tea is delayed. But not cancelled; I'll call on you when I return.

Best wishes,  
Grima Q

\--


End file.
